A MUSIC BOX GOOD-BYE

I want you to visualize this:  You have a music box and you wind it up.  You listen to the music—many notes, up and down the scale, some repeating themes, a few notes held long, most others very short, but finally, if it’s programmed right, more or less the music comes to a conclusion as the song starts to wind down.  The song doesn’t usually end, though, as it might if you experience it in a concert you attend or as you hear it on a recording or on the radio.  Rather, it starts to slow down, and slow down, and finally almost stops, and then a last note or two and then . . . stops.

So it is with most lives and most deaths.  So it was recently with Aretha Franklin and John McCain.  So it will be with almost all the people we know and so it will be with  us. 

There will be lingering memories of the pitch they sang in, the songs they sang, the concerts they performed in, the speeches on the floor, the places they walked, or sat, or built, or spent time in—the  notes they emphasized in their lives.   And then they wind down and the music stops . . . or does it?  Or should it?

Who, in our generation, will not remember Aretha belting out R-E-S-P-E-C-T whenever we hear it replayed for the next how many years of our lives, or visualize and ‘hear’ the voice of John McCain reminding us of stoic and heroic patriotism when someone invokes his name? Or when we remember special times in the lives of our loved-ones, or ourselves with them, at unbidden moments, when just their name is mentioned, or you see a picture, or a scent, or go to a place where they once walked? 

Just remember the music box.  It didn’t just stop; it just wound down and we no longer hear it.  But it will be wound up again by another hand and its music will play on another stage and delight and inspire and add to the music once played by billions and billions of other sisters and brothers . . . and one day, too, by our music box.